Sam Biddle

[Editor's Note: I am not editing this. Because I do not know what it is. But you should read it. —Joe]

Almost everything is bad. Usually, really bad, and not even bad in an interesting way. Tech is no exception—if anything, tech might be the worst of the bad. The Internet? Gross. The people who use it? Ugh. And it's fine to hate it all.

If you walk out of your door during daylight you'll have to look at your feet in order not to see something horrible. And even then, you might be wearing some dumb shoes I hate, like those dumbass finger shoes. If you wear those, go to hell. Then look up, and I bet you'll see someone wearing Beats By Dre headphones. Follow him back to his apartment, and he probably has some idiot overpriced Bose sound dock that plays music just as well as something cheaper, but because he's a suggestible semi-human, he bought bulky rainbow idiot headphones and that dock. He bought them because he just wants to look cool, and feel cool, and be accepted. And he is, because everyone around him is just as dumb. Look, that girl's wearing Beats By Dre too, or maybe they're the equally bad variant churned out by a few spare neurons of 50 Cent's. Maybe she saw the same ads I see every day on the subway for Monster audio equipment. She wants something bright on her head due to some low evolutionary reflex, and anything expensive is good. That's the way things work. Expensive things are better, no how many articles we and our peers write to the contrary. If you buy the most expensive, widely advertised headphones, they'll be the best. The bigger the poster on the subway, the better the headphone. Does it have a letter on the side of it? Is it shit lime green and shiny? Is it tacky and horrible? Buy that, at Best Buy, because it's the good one.

Advertisement

People who buy headphones are awful.

But of course they're not alone. Most Android users are insufferable and the worst too. No, you see, it's fine that this phone is ugly and slow, because you can root it and customize it. Don't you want to spend hours customizing your phone? Don't you realize how superior the flexibility of a new ROM is? Don't you know what a ROM is? Aren't you downloading a ROM? Download a ROM and put it on your phone—or just use that iPhone, you troglodyte. You poseur. Meanwhile I'll be over here installing my ROM. Power use. Power user, power using. I've got this thing customized like you wouldn't believe. Don't believe it? Watch me as I'm forced to manually install an app so I can get text notifications that are actually visible outside of the notification bar. It doesn't matter that the keyboard my phone came with is this bad. I'm downloading a new one right now. Fragmentation? Fragment me. Fragment me and throw away the key, or whatever.

I hate you. Oh hey guess what:

iPads are fucking horrible, as a concept. They're fun to use, but pouring pearls out of giant flour sacks onto the dancing and desperate homeless would also probably be fun. Tablets are a complete luxury item—PURE luxury—and owning one makes you an asshole, instantly, categorically. It's a wonderful toy. But a toy. A big boy toy. Nobody needs an iPad. Nobody. Not a single person, unless you're literally so stupid and/or infirm that you can't use a keyboard and mouse like the rest of the industrialized (or barbaric) world. iPads are a status symbol, a second computer that's built expressly for convenience. You're spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars to make your cushy life even cushier by carrying a beautiful computer you don't need that you can use while flopped down on the couch or leaning against an airplane window like the bourgeois brat idiot you are. You don't need this thing, and you know you don't need it. You need a PC-yes. You need a PC to be part of modern society. But you don't need an iPad, and the entire notion of the luxury device is noxious and offensive and the very throbbing essence of Western decadence. It's immoral to own an iPad, but that won't stop you or me or anyone from coveting them and reading about them until our eyes squirt blood, dripping down the pristine oleophobic Gorilla Glass IX.

Twitter! Websites! Oh they're almost all bad. Virtually all websites and people who make them and use them are horrendous. Subhuman. Maybe inhuman. Nobody on Facebook is funny. They recycle the same horrible image memes that 4chan snowballed into Reddit's mouth months ago. Years ago. And now they're back again. Remember Shit Girls Say? Remember the 560,000 knockoffs? That was fun. That was funny. Look at QuickMeme—people are making the same jokes, over and over, over and over and over, and it's being viewed more than anything I'll ever write in my life. The same picture of a raccoon with Impact text over it. Have you ever been to 9GAG? It's worse than a Taliban coordination message board.

It'll go on like this forever, because people will never change, but technology will only get faster. Well, we might change, in that technology is turning us into ever-stupider, ever-strunger-outer attention anorexics with a thirst for nothing but meme gristle and Internet lists. Before we implode from the psychological strain strains of saying, doing, making, buying, sharing, and generally slathering about the worst ideas and products in the history of humanity, let's all agree that it's OK to whine. It's OK to say that things are terrible, because they are. It's OK. It's true and it's OK. Try it with me. Try it with me and then go to hell, because you'll probably share a Scumbag Steve pic later today.

User Manual is Gizmodo's guide to etiquette. It appears as if by magic every Friday.